1. Field of the Invention
Implementations described herein relate generally to document processing, and, more particularly, to customization of content and advertisements in publications.
2. Description of Related Art
Consumers may purchase a variety of publications in various forms, e.g., print form (e.g., newspapers, magazines, books, etc.), electronic form (e.g., electronic newspapers, electronic books (“e-Books”), electronic magazines, etc.), etc. The publishers define the content of such publications, and advertisers define which advertisements (ads) may be seen in the publications. Since consumers have no control over publication content or advertisements, they may purchase a publication that contains at least some content and advertisements that may be of no interest to them.
Publishers often lack insight into the profiles of consumers who purchase their publications, and, accordingly, miss out on subscription and advertisement revenue due to a lack of personalized content and advertisements. Likewise, consumer targeting for advertisers is limited, and there is virtually no standardization for ad sizes (e.g., an ad that is supposed to be a full page may need to be reduced in size to fit within a publication). Accordingly, advertisers sometimes purchase sub-optimal or worthless ad space in an attempt to reach their target markets. Advertisers also have difficulty identifying new prospective market segments to target because they have limited insight into the desires and reactions of consumers.
Existing news aggregation services search out, and aggregate, news content published on web pages throughout the Internet. In response to a search query from a user, or when a user browses a newspaper section of the news aggregation service, the news aggregation service presents a list of stories, from the aggregated news content, relevant to the query or to the newspaper section requested, with each story involving a group of articles from different publications dealing with the same topic. To keep abreast of developments in the news, users must access the news aggregation service, re-enter a search query and view relevant news stories. Unfortunately, such services fail to enable a consumer to create a customized publication containing personalized content from a variety of sources (e.g., electronic newspapers, electronic books, electronic magazines, online encyclopedias, web sites, blogs, blog posts, etc.), and containing personalized advertisements.
A few systems customize industry information for business executives. However, such systems are often manual, not scalable, do not include ad targeting, and do not offer selection of personalized (i.e., consumer selected) advertisements. Such systems also do not allow the business executive to create a customized publication containing personalized content from a variety of sources.
Variable data printing exists for personalized direct mail campaigns. Variable data printing is a form of on-demand printing in which all the documents in a print run are similar but not identical. For example, when printing personalized letters to be mailed to customers, each letter may have the same basic layout, but there may be a different customer name and address on each letter. Variable data printed information fails to take consumer preferences in account, i.e., is not a customized publication created by a consumer, and may be based on demographics, geography, and/or generic mailing lists.